Friday, June 07, 2013

The Winds of Change....for Oracle Application Express 5.0

Beginning with Oracle Application Express 5.0, the minimum database version for Oracle Application Express will be Oracle Database 11.1.0.7. Extended Support for Oracle Database 11.1.0.7 ends in August 2015, per the Lifetime Support Policy, and while only roughly 10% of our APEX customers are still using Oracle Database 11.1, this is still considered a supported product for those customers on Extended Support.

Also beginning with Oracle Application Express 5.0, running APEX-built applications using Internet Explorer 6 will no longer be supported. This was primarily precipitated by the inclusion of jQuery UI 1.10.3 in Oracle Application Express 5.0, but quite honestly, the rest of the world is moving on, and so must Oracle Application Express.

We are also considering dropping support for Internet Explorer 7 to develop applications in the Application Builder, but this is still being evaluated and no final determination has been made. Feel free to sound off if you believe this would cause you or your customers any significant pain.

I can't imagine a customer still using IE6/7 but there are plenty that still use IE8, so as much as I dislike the browser, as a developer I still need to support IE8 for production. Development I can choose but production I'm afraid I can't.

Hi Joel,I'd love to know which features of 11g are becoming essential for Apex to run.I mean, I am interested in the technical reasons, not the commercial ones.I must say that apart from a few fixes in the XML area and the new PIVOT function in SQL, I don't see many other reasons to upgrade from 10gR2, but I do understand that sooner or later we need to move on.

I like the move but know that there are likely more people still using IE6 and 10g than we suspect. I know a significant portion of my current company is still using IE6/7 and all but one of our DBs is 10.2. Luckily, my APEX server is the one on 11.2

I'm not in favour of dropping support for Oracle 10gR2. While I understand that 12c is coming out soon, 10g is still an excellent database for small to medium sized companies. I guess the upgrade business must continue...